Crimes That Shocked the World

Summary

True-crime expert Danny Collins examines 23 crimes from the last 40 years that have been so shocking that their impact is still felt today

With 24-hour news channels and easy internet access, society as a whole is constantly bombarded with reports of crime from every corner of the globe. It seems that no sooner has one tragedy hit than stories of another are being flashed across computer screens and printed in newspapers worldwide. There are some crimes in every generation, however, that will never be forgotten. Just as people remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot, unforgettable tragedies of todaysuch as the attacks of 9/11 and the revulsion felt when the sickening details of the Fritzl case came to lightare indelibly imprinted on the global consciousness. Examining the horrific nature of some of these crimes, this exploration remembers how James Bulger, Sally Anne Bowman, Holly Wells, and Jessica Chapman, among others, have forever impacted society.

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Crimes That Shocked the World - Danny Collins

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CHAPTER 1

THE MURDER OF JAMES BULGER

Walton, Liverpool, England, 12 February 1993

‘C’mon baby, we’re going to have some fun’

– John Venables to James Bulger.

There is, in every man and woman on this planet, the capacity for violence – hot and unforgiving when our security or that of our loved ones is breached. But what possesses the cold-blooded killer, he or she who can be moved to commit murder without apparent motive other than an assumed blood lust? What can have moved two ten-year-old boys, no more than children themselves, to lure a younger child from its mother’s side and take it to a secluded spot, there to wreak the most horrible violence upon the young body until life was extinguished and then to leave the abused and battered corpse across railway lines in the hope that a passing train would further destroy the body and free the killers of suspicion?

Whereas no one could reasonably deny that Charles Darwin had something when he sat among giant tortoises on the Galapagos Islands and developed his theory of the survival of the fittest, just what being the fittest to survive indicates in this cruel world leaves us much to think about. The obvious, one assumes, is physical strength matched with intelligence in all its varying degrees, but one cannot deny that showing a hint of usefulness or attractiveness to the would-be aggressor must have saved a potential victim on countless occasions.

New-born and very young creatures are certainly not strong enough to fight off an aggressor, therefore they must rely on cuteness and charm to save the day. Puppies are endearing, kittens are cuddly, and children are loveable. All bring out a sense of protectiveness in those around them. Very few men or women would wilfully harm an animal or child without deep moral self recrimination. And yet it happens. Mothers stand by while their drunken boyfriend assaults their child, often with fatal results. Children tie tin cans to a cat’s tail and enjoy the animal’s frantic efforts to free itself. There is in man a deep, sadistic streak.

Yet sadism in itself has a purpose. It is about domination, self-gratification, and a desire to humiliate. Such motives were evident in the murder of three-year-old James Bulger in a Liverpool suburb in 1993, and the same motives reverberate through every other horrific crime of torture and murder reported in this book. Yet the case of James Bulger reflects a deeper horror in that it was committed by two ten-year-old boys. Animals (if animals will forgive us the description)? Unhinged individuals beyond the salvation offered by Britain’s overly moral judicial system? The reader must judge.

The discovery of two-year-old James Patrick Bulger’s tiny bisected, bloodied, and paint-spattered body by a group of bored teenagers wandering beside a seldom-used railway track at Walton, Liverpool, on 14 February 1993, struck horror into the hearts of parents everywhere. Even though he was only a month off his third birthday, so small was James’s body that the teenagers first thought that someone had abandoned a doll. The full horror of their discovery on the track alongside the Walton section of the freight line from Edge Hill to Bootle became clear only as they stepped forward for a closer look.

James Bulger had disappeared while shopping with his mother in a shopping centre in Bootle two days earlier. Children often become bored with shopping and wander off to become lost and bewildered among the milling crowd of shoppers, all intent on their own lists of errands. But after two hours of frantic searching by James’s parents (Denise and Ralph Bulger), security staff and police, worries of abduction, never far from the minds of all concerned parents, began to surface.

When his mutilated body was examined by investigators, it became obvious that the toddler hadn’t wandered onto the track in Walton – two miles from the shopping centre – of his own accord, and the police immediately became aware that they were dealing with a case of violent homicide.

It was clear that James Bulger had been beaten severely, and pathologists would find 38 fractures on his tiny skull, so many that the bone structure had collapsed. The blood-spattered weapons were lying close by in plain view – house bricks and a metre-long iron sleeper tie weighing 10 kg. The child’s track bottoms and underclothes had been removed, hinting at a possible dark motive for his abduction and murder. His face, which bore the imprint of a shoe, was stained with blue enamel paint of the type used by model makers, residues of which were also found on his anorak from which the hood had been torn. The hood would later be found high in the branches of a tree along the route from the Strand Shopping Centre to the site where the body was found.

Pathologists concluded that soon after death – caused by any one of the 38 skull fractures – James’s body was laid across the railway track in such a position that it would be hit by a passing train. The head and upper body were covered with bricks and rubble to disguise the pathetic form. The motive was clear to investigators – the killer or killers had attempted to make the death of James Bulger appear as a tragic accident.

The horror felt by police investigators and forensic officers was apparent. Who would inflict such injuries on a two-year-old child, beating the victim to death by a deserted railway track? And what could be deduced from the removal of the child’s lower clothing? An obvious first assumption would be that they were dealing with a child sex murder. However, that motive would be disproved with the arrest of the killers some weeks later. Ten-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables revealed they had killed for sadistic pleasure, rather like tying a burning rag to a puppy’s tail. They had abducted James Bulger from his mother’s side on a whim and, having eventually grown tired of their victim, they had killed him. Then, believing they had artfully covered up the crime, they had gone home for their tea.

On the morning of 12 February 1993, Denise Bulger had taken her son – often called ‘Jamie’ in the press reports of the murder but never so by his parents and immediate family – to visit his grandmother, Eileen Matthews, in Oak Towers, Kirkby. In fact Eileen had left earlier on a shopping trip to Birkenhead but Denise made the most of their visit by chatting to her sister, Sheila, while James played with his young cousin, Antonia. Later they would be joined by Nicola Bailey, the girlfriend of Denise’s brother Paul, who was looking after another Matthews child – a three-year-old cousin of James. Nicola suggested that Denise and James join her and her charge on a shopping expedition to the Strand Shopping Centre in Stanley Road, Bootle town centre.

The ensuing ride in Nicola’s Ford Orion delighted James for, like most toddlers, the lively two-year-old loved a car ride and thought it a great adventure. Sadly, the adventure that day was to end in his death.

Meanwhile, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables had left their respective homes in the Liverpool suburbs of Walton and Norris Green that morning with the intention of dodging school for the day, a common enough occurrence among local schoolchildren, referred to generally as ‘sagging’. The boys met up and Venables dumped his school bag in an accustomed hiding place where it would stay until he recovered it later. Forgotten in the bag was a note from his mother giving Jon permission to bring home the school gerbils that he was be in charge of for the weekend.

The boys headed for the Bootle Strand Shopping Centre, their usual truancy haunt, where they intended to go on a shoplifting spree for anything that took their fancy. Just how or when the idea of kidnapping a child came to them was never revealed in questioning, although, typically, the boys blamed each other. Whoever came up with the notion, its purpose was odious: to lure a child into the heavy traffic that roared past the shopping centre to create a potentially fatal accident. But once a victim was in their hands, however, their purpose became even more bloodcurdling.

The pair spent the morning in the shopping centre, generally making a nuisance of themselves by harassing elderly shoppers and stealing from shop displays. Their haul for the morning included sweets, make-up, fruit, Duracell batteries and a small tin of blue enamel paint, similar to the type used in craft modelling. The latter two items were to figure in the crime and the blue enamel paint would prove their downfall.

Throughout the morning, the disruptive presence of Venables and Thompson was noted and later recalled by shop staff and customers. An elderly woman reported being poked and prodded by the boys, who ran off laughing when she remonstrated with them. The staff at McDonald’s recalled chasing the boys out of the area where they had been leaping over chairs and throwing leftovers from un-cleared tables. When asked why they weren’t in school, the boys replied that it was a holiday. As midday approached, the boys became bored with their antics and began to concentrate on their previously concocted plan to steal a child from under the care of its mother. Thompson and Venables were tired of petty, childish crime and were preparing to step into a new dimension of kidnap and murder.

Their first attempt centred on a three-year-old girl and her two-year-old brother in the T J Hughes store. Their mother noticed that the girl and her brother were playing with two older boys who were amusing the children by playing chasing games near the door of the shop. She called her children over to her side but a short while later realised they had strayed again. Running outside she saw Venables and Thompson beckoning to the children to follow them and she shouted for them to return. The boys then waved the children away and lost themselves among nearby shoppers. Their plan had gone badly, but with patience other opportunities would soon present themselves.

Meanwhile, James Bulger had become bored with the shopping expedition. His uncle’s girlfriend seemed to be taking a long time making up her mind about which underwear to buy and his mother was chatting to a shop assistant. Now he joined his young cousin in chasing up and down between the aisles of clothing in a frenzied game of tag. At one point he became lost among the hanging clothes and, struck with terror, called for his mother. Denise was at his side in an instant and warned him not to stray again.

It was now approaching 1.00 pm and they were all ready for lunch – meat patties, which Denise bought in an adjacent delicatessen. As the children nibbled contentedly at their food, all four moved on to Tesco’s where James began to act up again, this time taking items from the shelves and shouting. The final straw was James’s attempt to ride an escalator, which led to a paddy tantrum when Denise hauled him off. The only solution seemed to be to bribe the two children with sweets and head for home – but first Denise needed to visit the butcher’s to buy something for the family’s tea.

Denise was now in a hurry to make her purchases, given James’s fractious behaviour and the need to get him home for a sleep, that panacea so favoured by mothers of overactive children. But there was some delay at the counter when the butcher’s assistant brought her the wrong chops and she had to wait for them to be changed. When she looked around for James – who had been standing near the door contentedly chewing on his sweets – he was nowhere to be seen.

In a panic, she asked his little cousin where he had gone and the little girl pointed to the arcade outside. ‘He went out there,’ she told her aunt timidly. Denise rushed outside and frantically tried to spot her diminutive son in his distinctive blue anorak and yellow hood among the milling crowd. Not seeing him, she ran back into the shop and called to Nicola, who was waiting to be served at the cold meat counter. Together they left the shop and began a desperate search, hampered by the presence of the three-year-old girl, who was dragged, bewildered, in their wake. Within a few minutes of James’s disappearance, the two women split up and Denise continued unhindered to the security office.

As a message was flashed to shoppers over the Centre’s loudspeaker system, Denise began a systematic search of all the shops they had visited previously in the hope that James had wandered back the way they had come. For half an hour she searched in a poorly remembered daze, but to no avail. Nicola Bailey, together with her young charge, was also searching in other directions and questioning passers-by, but no one had seen the little boy. James, it seemed, had disappeared into thin air.

At that moment, James was being led by Jon Venables – later to be seen on the Centre’s CCTV holding the toddler by the hand while Robert Thompson walked ahead – out onto Stanley Road. The innocent-looking trio, easily mistaken by passers-by for two young lads and their younger brother, were captured on the camera leaving the shopping centre at 1.42 pm, about the same time that Denise had noticed her son’s absence. ‘C’mon baby,’ said Venables, ‘we’re going to have some fun.’

In the shopping centre, pandemonium was rife. Police Constable Mandy Walker had arrived in response to a message that a child was missing in the Strand and immediately began to coordinate another search by security officers and other policemen responding to the scene. She also accompanied Denise around the Centre in the hope that the mother would spot her child, pale-faced and panicked, as he searched for his mother. James had been missing now for 40 minutes, and locating a lost child in the Strand usually took no more than 15 minutes. PC Mandy Walker was justifiably concerned.

James was tired. The trio had walked a mile along Stanley Road and his little legs hurt. It was way past his nap time and he was becoming increasingly irritable, a fact that didn’t please his kidnappers who were possibly now beginning to regret their impetuous behaviour in snatching the child from under his mother’s nose. That had been cool, real grown-up stuff, but the crying toddler was beginning to annoy them.

A passer-by would recall how she saw the two boys with the crying toddler near the canal bank in Stanley Road and thought the child was ‘extremely distressed’. She noticed ‘a large bruise’ on his forehead, caused, it would later be revealed, when one of the boys had attempted to lift him and dropped him on his head. Unaware of the drama – soon to turn to tragedy – befalling the child, she did not intervene.

In all, the police investigation would reveal that there were 28 sightings of James Bulger with his juvenile kidnappers that day. Although many of the eyewitnesses reported a small child apparently unhappy in the company of two older boys, no one felt compelled to ask why the child was so upset. A motorist driving along Merton Road recalled a child crying as he was pulled along by the arms by two older boys. A woman passing on a bus saw two boys swinging a child by his arms. The child, she reported, was alternately laughing and crying. She identified the boys as about nine years old. The child, she told police, was ‘just a baby’.

By the time Thompson and Venables had reached the raised, grassed-over site of the Breeze Hill Reservoir it was about 4.20 pm, approximately around the same time police were alerted to James’s disappearance by Strand security staff. The boys with their tiny victim in tow then left the reservoir area and turned into nearby Stuart Street, which they followed to its junction with County Road, a busy main route out of the city that would eventually bring them to the scene of James’s eventual murder at Walton. Did they have a goal in mind? Neither has ever said if the route was planned.

James was becoming more irritable and tired. They were now nearly two miles from the Strand Shopping Centre, a long way for a two-year-old to walk. His distressed behaviour was attracting the attention of more and more eyewitnesses who would come forward after the body was discovered to tell investigators varying stories of a sobbing toddler and his two ‘brothers’. But again, nobody intervened. It is not in the English nature to enquire too deeply of a spectacle witnessed in the street. Look no further than how abusive thugs on public transport are ignored as commuters become deeply involved behind their newspapers.

Back in Kirkby, the news of James’s disappearance began to circulate among the Bulger and the Matthews clans, and the menfolk started to tour the area around the Strand in their cars, looking for the child. By now consumed by guilt, Denise wept as she was comforted by the womenfolk. ‘You can’t watch them forever,’ was a constant phrase given in assurance to the distressed mother. How far could a two-year-old have gone, after all? He’d be found curled up asleep somewhere – of course he would.

On the way to Walton, Jon Venables had grabbed James’s anorak by the hood and attempted to drag the child along. The material tore and, giving the fallen toddler a kick to get him to his feet, Venables hurled the hood into the branches of a tree where it would later be recovered by police. Finally, the duo and their victim arrived at the site of the old Walton railway station which had been demolished following the conversion of the old passenger line to freight. Low brick walls on either side of the double track still mark the original sites of the passenger platforms. It was here that the final torment of little James Bulger began. Throughout their statements to police following their arrests, neither boy would admit to physically harming the toddler and laid the blame for each injury firmly against the other.

What is evident from forensic and Scene of Crime reports is that James Bulger was used as a target for house bricks, beaten about the head and body with wooden sticks and an iron tie bar, and stripped of his underclothes. An attempt, never confirmed by police who remained silent on many of the toddler’s more severe injuries, was possibly made to jam batteries into his anus. He was also spattered with blue enamel paint, a residue of which would be found on Venables’s jacket following his arrest three weeks later.

Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were tried for the abduction and murder of James Patrick Bulger at Preston Crown Court on 1 November, 1993. Both boys had turned 11 by the date of the trial but were still, nonetheless – along with 10-year-old Mary Bell in 1968 – the youngest children to stand trial for murder in Britain in the 20th century.

English law dictates that children between 10 and 14 are exempt from criminal responsibility unless the prosecution can prove that at the time of the offence the child was aware of the gravity of the crime. Thus, the jury was faced with deciding whether Thompson and Venables were equally guilty of the offences with which they were charged.

In the late morning of 24 November, after counsels’ closing speeches, the jury retired to consider its verdict and returned just under six hours later to pronounce both defendants guilty as charged on all counts. On passing his sentence that both should be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure, Justice Morland told the young murderers: ‘The killing of James Bulger was an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity. This child of two was taken from his mother on a journey of over two miles, and then on a railway line battered to death without mercy. Then his body was placed across the railway line so that it would be run over by a train, in an attempt to conceal the murder. In my judgement your conduct was both cunning and very wicked.’